Hey everybody, we’re back with volume 11. This volume took a bit longer than the last couple because we did uh… Three 3-Gatsu no Lion chapters, an Ikoku Nikki chapter, and a whole volume of DRCL in between. Which really took a lot out of me to be honest, that DRCL volume. Compared to that, translating this volume where we there’s long sections about consulting companies and foreign aid and inter-company deal making around building factories was downright easy. Anyhow I’m glad to be back on doing this series and I’m thankful to all those that helped out. A lot of these projects are mainly just me doing all or most of the jobs so it can be a bit exhausting. Like I mentioned in some of the other posts here about Shima, I dunno how long a lot of these volumes will end up taking me since there’s no limit to how fast we could potentially do these since the series is already out in Japanese. I basically need to find my own personal equilibrium where I’m making progress on this but not going so overboard that I get burnt out or I’m neglecting some other part of my life. It can be tricky at times.

I should give a warning that this story does get a bit dark at times and one of the darker events happens in this volume, so be warned. This volume also takes place entirely in the Philippines, and has a lot more story talking about what it was like there in the early 90’s and Japan’s relationship with them. Anyhow, enjoy, everyone! Tell other folks about this series if you like it, I think it’s really something unique and unlike anything else I’ve ever read. I hope we can grow the English-speaking fandom somewhat.

Check out my summary here of what this series is about if you haven’t seen it yet.

Also, we have a new Discord! Come hang out and talk about manga. https://discord.gg/Nw45rfJYZF

Section Chief Shima Kо̄saku Volume 11 (Ch99-109)
ZippyShare
Mega
Online Reader (Mangadex)

Whew, we finally make it to the double digits. Here is Shima volume 10, everyone. After now over a year of work we’re at volume 10 of the 17 volumes of this part. Really I’m quite proud of this, it’s been tons and ton of work translating this and getting the project constantly moving. When you’re doing a big project like this where it can potentially take years and years if you don’t keep up a decent pace it can be hard to be motivated. It’s such a long journey to try to do a series this long and you need to work on it pretty regularly if you want to get it each release finished and in a releasable state at a quality level you’re proud of. And we got this done on top of Gishi Sanjinden and Ikoku Nikki this month which was a huge challenge (Go check those out if you haven’t yet, they’re great). For this I had to basically finish one task and immediately start on another for the past several weeks. It’s been exhausting.

But all that considered, we’ve finally made it to the Philippines. The Philippines arc in Section Chief goes for a pretty long time and it’s an interesting look at a totally different country with a different culture and different economic standards. This arc goes for a while and a lot happens, so I hope you all enjoy it. I feel like I keep saying “A lot happens” in every one of these posts but I guess when you release a whole volume at once that’s always the case. And generally I want people to get an idea of the story from reading it rather than me summarizing things and spoiling them too much in these posts.

And we’re now far past the mid-way point of Section Chief Shima Kōsaku, though we’re like… about an 8th of the way through the series as a whole or something. Like I said I’m not making any concrete plans about doing the whole series because that would take thousands of hours and several years but at least reaching the end of “Section Chief” is getting closer and closer and that feels pretty good after so much work, as that’s the story I really wanted to focus on getting out there. Though so long as I pace myself and don’t get burned out I’ll be okay with doing more past that point.

There’s a new 3-Gatsu no Lion chapter coming out later this week for the first time in a while, so won’t be long until then. Look forward to that. Anyhow, enjoy everyone!

Check out my summary here of what this series is about if you haven’t seen it yet.

Also, we have a new Discord! Come hang out and talk about manga. https://discord.gg/Nw45rfJYZF

Section Chief Shima Kо̄saku Volume 10 (Ch87-98)
ZippyShare
Mega
Online Reader (Mangadex)

Oooookay, and here we are, volume 9! This volume contains the grand finale of the president-change drama arc. And then a whole bunch of other stuff after that. And with 9 volumes done that means we are past the half way point of the 17 volumes of Section Chief Shima Kōsaku! Man we’ve really made a lot of progress. It’s been almost exactly a year since we released volume 1 now, I think it’s gone pretty well. I started it while I was still doing Takeshi which was kind of a lot to be doing at once so the first few had a bit gap between releases. But the last few have been 3 weeks to a month apart which is kind of blazing fast when you consider how much text is in each of these.

This volume’s got a lot. Including the end of the aforementioned story arc, it’s got a bunch more characterization of recurring characters and continues building the overarching story. Also the manga turns into a boxing manga for a little while for some reason.

I dunno if anyone’s all that interested in this but I’ve been trying to track down the color pages for this series if I can. We’ve been including the extra color pages from the bunkobans and any magazine covers or color pages I can locate at the end of the volumes as extras. If you’re not aware, the color pages are in the original magazine but then they’re often not included when the series is compiled into books of just that series, but sometimes there’s some kind of “collector’s edition” that has all the color pages. This series has a LOT of editions, most of which are out of print. This series has been popular for a long time and as a result it has a lot of editions and reprints and repackaged versions. The earlier the part of the series it is, the more editions it has. So with Section Chief being the first, it has the most. But even then none of them just… have all the color pages. They’re all basically the same product every time despite having tons of editions.
It has tankoubons (the original volumes), bunkobans (pocket paperback size editions), shinsouhens (special editions, like bunkobans but more pages per book and fewer total books), gold soushuuhens (compilation editions, these weird larger editions on cheap paper they only did for volumes 1-14 with sometimes different art on the covers), wide aizoubans (wide collector’s editions which are pretty much the same as the shinsouhens but with different jackets), chronicles (A sort of selection of specific chapters. Labeled by a range of years they came out rather than being numbered), zenshuus (completed works editions, which are expensive deluxe things in boxes), encore editions (big 350+ page books labeled by what age Shima is in them), platinum comics editions (This is some other sort of big cheap version), selections (These just have names about what are in them, like ones specifically about Shima’s love life), and Kaigen Shima Kōsaku edtions (This is a digital-only version that is just the digital versions repackaged with a different cover and more pages per digital book).
And among these they have different versions of some of the color pages. Like the color pages in the bunkobans I’ve been putting in the releases sometimes put the original drawing on an abstract background and sometimes they do stuff like stretch one panel across a double page spread or make one panel be tinted blue or yellow or something so it looks kinda artsy instead of like the original page. They also don’t include all of them. Recently I found out that the Gold Soushuuhens contain some of the regular color pages that are part of the actual comic so I bought those and we’ll be including them from now on, though they only go up to volume 14 and they only contain the color pages from the first chapter of each volume, not the ones in the middle. There doesn’t seem to be any sort of online resource that says what color pages are in each of the other editions and I don’t think it’s worth it to me to buy them to try to find out because that would end up being really expensive just to find out the likely answer of “this has the same ones as the bunkobans”. So as a result we’ll have a few more color pages I found in the Gold Soushuuhens and if I ever find proof that one of the other editions is worth buying I might get one of those but probably I think we’ll be sticking with just these. I added the color pages from them to volumes 1-8 in all the usual locations you can get them.
I should also mention that previously I had a couple names romanized wrong, it should’ve been “Tomabechi” not “Tomapechi” and “Usami” not “Usabi”. I went back and changed all these a couple weeks ago but I feel I should mention that.

There’s no Ikoku Nikki this month, and although it was announced a 3-Gatsu no Lion chapter was coming out it was delayed due to Umino-sensei being ill, and supposedly 3-Gatsu will be resuming in October. So because we haven’t had either of those series or Jojo to do these have been coming out pretty fast. It’s probably not gonna keep up at this pace though. October has Ikoku Nikki and 3-Gatsu plus the new DRCL volume is coming out so that’s going to occupy a lot of my time, and I’m translating and typesetting these Shima volumes on my own. I’ve also been trying to get Shino Ura’s other one-volume manga of short stories done but it’s been quite a slog and is taking way longer than I expected it do. Those stories are full of a lot of abstract language and lore. Essentially that’s what I’ll be focusing on for the next month or so in addition to working on Shima volume 10. So a lot going on there.

Check out my summary here of what this series is about if you haven’t seen it yet.

Also, we have a new Discord! Come hang out and talk about manga. https://discord.gg/Nw45rfJYZF

Section Chief Shima Kо̄saku Volume 9 (Ch76-86)
Mega
Online Reader (Mangadex)